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the boggy ground in typical autumnal style except that now it did so with a
vengeance, Men to his right and left were floundering, having to make detours,
leaving large patches of thick reeds untouched. It was destroying any scent
which the dogs might have picked up, too. In all, a bloody waste of time.
Except for that nagging hunch; keep going, you're on the right track.
Nevertheless, the search would have to be called off soon, the detective could
not avoid that. If anybody got drowned or lost the media would flay the
police; thete were times when you couldn't win and this was one of them.
And then he saw the house, a tumbledown ruin that the swamp was going to
destroy, the clearing waterlogged with this stinking slime. Jim Fillery got
his hunch again, more positive than before, almost like the scent the dogs
were supposedly searching for, a fox earth which the hounds knew was
inhabited.
'I'm going to check the house,' he called out to the man on his right who was
just visible in the gloom. Tell the others to form a cordon around it, just in
case.' His words sounded strangely muffled but the other raised a hand to show
that he had understood. Check the house, then we'll call it a day. But we will
anyway because the feeling's strong, very strong. Fillery slipped his hand in
his pocket, felt the comforting hard metallic coldness of his gun. He would
not hesitate to use it if he had to, maybe he would anyway. A policeman was
missing, probably dead, and that was one time when emotions ruled.
The door was open a foot or so, hanging by a single rusty hinge. He squeezed
through the gap, drew his pistol from his pocket, his keen eyes taking in the
hallway. That trap door was closed but thick muddy water was lifting it so
that it virtually floated. The cellar was flooded, overflowing. Foster
wouldn't be down there. If he was then the State had been spared a lot of
expense.
He glanced towards the stairs and that was when he knew, realisation hitting
him like the backhanders his mother used to lash out with when he was a boy.
He saw the footmarks, muddy imprints that were still wet, telling their own
story. Heavy criss-cross bars of rubber Wellington soles, smaller naked ones
following in their wake. A man and a woman.
Fillery's brain was already working on permutations:
(1) PC Lee and Thelma Brown.
(2) James Foster and Carol Embleton.
(3) Andy Dark and . . . ?
His keen brain was instantly processing the information it had been given. One
of the girls, certainly, because both had fled naked into Droy Wood. It was
impossible at a glance to tell which but at least one of them was still alive
(or had been a very short time ago). Lee and Foster had both left their
clothes behind in their respective Minis.
Fillery pulled a wry face, felt a surge of disappointment. That only left
Dark, Unless of course Foster had murdered either or both men, taken Dark's
boots. Or the constable had come upon the nature conservation officer's body,
helped himself to his footwear.
But the detective was wasting time surmising; there was only one way to find
out. He moved forward, gun at the ready. Somebody was upstairs and he was
going up after them.
The staircase creaked, threatened to collapse under his weight, boards rotted
and missing. A slow ascent, hating himself for the faint glimmering of fear
that smouldered in his stomach, threatened to knot his guts into a hard ball.
He remembered that time only a few weeks after he had been promoted to the
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CID. Some crackpot with a grudge against society had held a 14-year-old girl
hostage in a high-rise block of flats. The guy had a shotgun, had fired at the
police down below, threatened to kill himself and the kid if his demands for
freedom and a pardon weren't met. The same kind of mentality as Foster, he had
a string of convictions for assaulting young children. Time was running out.
Fillery and another detective had gone up in the elevator while those down
below attempted to distract the maniac's attention.
Fillery had been in the lead, his companion only too happy to follow behind.
They had both been scared as hell. Somebody was going to get killed in the
next few minutes, it might be all of them. Suddenly you faced death; it was
more of a certainty than a probability. You knew also that you had to kill
somebody.
Jim Fillery had wanted to vomit, to run back down those stairs, tell the super
he wasn't going to die for anybody. But something pushed him forward,
transcended his terror. He didn't know what it was, never really found out.
But he'd gone on, kicked the door down, and inside that tiny flat the man had
just been sitting propped up in the corner. The girl hadn't even gone
hysterical and that was when the anti-climax had struck him. In a way it was a
let-down because he had never had to push himself past that final barrier,
test himself.
Until now. He had to go through it all again.
Along the landing, up on to the second floor. And then he saw the balcony with
three people standing on it, a stone ledge that might decide to crumble at any
second. His stomach flipped, began to tighten, churning his bowels.
Dark and Carol Embleton. The former was holding a pistol in his hand, dangling
at arm's length as though he had forgotten that he had it, the girl clutching
his other arm, both of them staring transfixed at the man who faced them.
That was when Fillery's terror threatened to erupt inside him. That bloated
jowled face, the flesh resembling that of a fish that was beginning to
decompose, eyes receding so that the puffy sockets were closing over them.
Lips curled into an expression of hate and gloating, ragged clothing that
seemed to rot even as you ran your eye over it, a once colourful apparel that
moths and time had shredded.
Everything had stopped, a confrontation that had been frozen like a movie
still. The three of them might have been dead, rigor mortis somehow holding
them erect against a background of swirling mist and the roaring of an angry
sea that sounded a lot closer than it had when Fillery had heard it down
below.
He watched them closely, knew that they were alive, that he was witnessing
some dreadful final act in a drama that had gone on here for a very long time.
Noises; it sounded like distant gunfire, explosions, but it could have been
the waves pounding on the shoreline. Shouts, probably from the search party
down below but they were gone before you could be sure. And somehow you got
the feeling that that repulsive figure out there was the focal point of all
this, his bearing that of a master rather than a servant. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]